Cisco was off when we stepped through.
I felt it half a second before we cleared the breach. The geometry of the disc didn't sit right against the air — it had the shape of a controlled vibe but the anchor was wrong, like a door hung in a frame that had warped in summer heat. I got my left foot on the other side and looked back and Cisco was already saying —wait, no, this isn't —
Then we were through.
Wrong street.
Wrong city, maybe. Definitely wrong street. The Hub City alley from the December trip had been brick. The Earth-2 industrial yard from November had been chain-link and concrete. This was a Central City street — I knew Central City's geometry well enough to see the shape of the buildings — but the buildings on this street had art-deco cornices that Earth-1 Central City did not have, and the ground was wet, and the air smelled like ozone instead of pre-rain wet concrete, and the streetlights were brass.
Earth-2 Central City.
The wrong neighborhood.
Cisco was bent forward with his hands on his knees.
"Cisco."
"I know, I know, the anchor slipped, I felt it slip, give me a second to —"
The cold hit us at the side of the alley.
Not a wind. A sphere of cold, a six-foot-radius bubble of it, lowering the temperature inside the alley by twenty degrees in a quarter-second. The puddles on the pavement crystallized as I watched.
A woman's voice: "Earth-One visitors."
I turned with my hand already up.
She was at the entrance to the alley.
Caitlin's face. Caitlin's posture. Caitlin's exact way of folding her arms when she was about to deliver bad news. Hair dyed silver-white at the roots, the tips going to a clean Caitlin-brown, like the dye job was three weeks old. Lips coated with a frost rim. Eyes pale. Not pale-pale — cold pale, the irises iced over.
She walked into the alley at a measured pace.
"Zoom is going to be," she said, and the voice was Caitlin's and not Caitlin's and it landed in my chest like a fist, "so pleased to know you came to visit."
I held very still.
Behind her, walking out of the same archway, came Ronnie.
Wrong Ronnie. A face I'd only seen on Earth-1 in still images Caitlin had on her desk. He was lit from inside — a glow under the skin, around the eye sockets, a quiet white-orange the color of a coal that had been brushed clean. His grin was wrong on Ronnie's mouth.
"Ronnie," Cisco said. Not because he meant Ronnie. Because his mouth made the word before his brain caught up.
Killer Frost looked at him. The grin came onto her mouth too.
"Oh, Vibe," she said. "Oh, this is going to be fun."
"Vibe," Cisco repeated.
She raised her hand.
I phased Cisco backward through the wall of the building behind us before her ice arrived. We went through brick and then through plaster and then we came out in a stockroom with shelves of canned goods on Earth-2 brand labels with the Earth-2 typeface, and the wall behind us was now a rind of ice across the stockwork side.
Cisco was breathing in fast bursts.
"Was that — was that —"
"Yes."
"Was that her —"
"Yes."
"Why was —"
"Cisco. Breach. Now."
He shut up.
His hands came up.
The breach shimmered into being on the wall opposite the iced-over one — and held — and flickered. He was rattled. His vibe-anchor wasn't holding.
"I can't — Harry, I can't lock it, she's interfering with —"
The wall behind us exploded.
Killer Frost had caught up. Came through her own ice the way I'd come through brick — she'd phased through her own ice — and she stood in the new gap she'd made and lifted her hand and ice javelins three feet long formed in the air to her left.
I activated Unbreakable.
I activated Plasma Core in the same breath.
Cisco saw both of them light up.
I had time to watch his face register plasma before the first javelin reached us. I caught it in my left hand and the impact drove me back two feet. Unbreakable held. Plasma Core flared on my right palm — a fistful of white-orange light that caught the second javelin in the air and turned it to vapor mid-flight, the steam hissing.
Frost paused.
Her head tilted.
"Oh," she said. "You're interesting."
Deathstorm came around the corner.
Two of them in a stockroom is not a fight. It's a math problem. The math said three seconds before a fire-meta and an ice-meta who had clearly worked together for years had me boxed in a kill funnel.
"CISCO."
"I'm trying, the anchor —"
I threw the fistful of plasma at the floor between us and Frost.
It hit the linoleum and went off in a brief dome of white that scorched up to the ceiling tiles. The dome blocked her line of sight for two and a half seconds.
That was enough.
Cisco's hands snapped up and the breach behind us opened — narrow, ragged, but open — and he grabbed my coat at the shoulder and threw me through with both hands.
I went through.
He was a half-second behind me.
The breach clamped shut on something — a tongue of frost that slipped through the closing seam and hit the breach-room floor on Earth-1 in a small puddle of crystals — and then we were on STAR Labs concrete and the breach was gone and the only sound in the breach room was my Unbreakable holding shape over my own hammering heart.
Cisco hit the floor on his hands and knees.
His breath came in ragged tearing pulls.
I let Unbreakable drop. The cooldown locked.
My left arm — the one I'd caught the javelin with — was numb from the elbow down. The skin from wrist to elbow was greyish-white. Frostbite, deep, into the muscle. Unbreakable had taken the killing edge off but there'd been more than Unbreakable could absorb.
I sat down on the floor next to Cisco.
"You okay."
"Am I okay."
"Yeah."
"Am I —"
He lifted his head. Looked at me.
Looked at my arm.
Looked at me.
Looked at the wall where the breach had been three seconds ago.
For a full minute he didn't speak.
Then he said, very quietly:
"How many powers do you have, Harry."
I held his look.
I could lie. I could give him three more, hold the rest, walk it forward in increments. The plasma was already in the room with us. He'd seen the white. He'd seen the vapor of an ice javelin in midair. He'd seen me hold Unbreakable Warrior for a sustained four-second engagement which was more than I'd held it in front of him before. I could give him a controlled disclosure, build it back into a manageable lie, manage him.
I thought about his terms on the legal pad in the equipment room three months ago.
I thought about Caitlin in the corridor saying I want it eventually.
I thought about my left forearm going numb the way Eliza Harmon's had gone numb on the floor of a pharmacy four days ago, and the cellular damage I'd taken to add a stained slot to a list I was about to be asked the length of.
I let the breath out.
"More than three," I said.
"I see that."
"I'm going to tell you. Most of it. Tonight. I want Caitlin in the room when I do."
Cisco didn't move.
He looked at the wall.
He looked at his own hands.
"Vibe," he said. Quiet. "She called me Vibe."
"Yeah."
"How did she know that name."
"I don't know."
"Harry."
"I don't know that one. That's not me. That's a name your other self wears over there. Why she knew it on you the second she saw you — I genuinely don't have an answer for that."
He looked at me.
He believed me. Which was worse, in a way, than him not. He believed me about the small specific thing because he could see I was telling him the truth about the small specific thing, and he was going to have to carry that into the larger conversation we were about to have, which meant the larger conversation was going to start from a baseline of Harry is capable of telling me the truth when he chooses to.
That baseline was going to make every other thing I told him heavier.
He pushed himself up on shaking legs.
Took two slow breaths.
Walked to the intercom by the door and pressed the button.
"Cait. Med bay. Bring the burn kit. Harry needs a patch and we need to talk."
He let go of the button.
Looked back at me on the floor.
"Tonight."
"Tonight."
"All of it."
"Most of it."
His mouth tightened.
"As much as I'm getting tonight, then."
"Yeah."
He went out into the corridor.
I sat on the breach-room floor with my left arm in my lap and my right hand cradling the wrist of the dead-cold left one and I waited for Caitlin's footsteps in the hall.
When they came they were faster than usual.
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